Page 78 of Darkness and Deceit
“I was going to?—”
“No,” she cuts in. “Youweren’t. You were going to pretend it didn’t happen. Because it scared you.”
That lands harder than I expect.
“You’re not wrong,” I admit.
She doesn’t back off. “Tell me. What do they mean?”
I pause, choosing each word with precision. “The scryer doesn’t create anything. It reveals. The magic you saw was simply drawn out by your touch. The threads you saw are real. And they exist whether we speak of them or not.”
She doesn’t hesitate. “And the one that pointed to you?”
I, on the other hand, do hesitate.
Finally, I whisper, “I don’t know.”
Which is not a lie. Not entirely.
She stares at me, like she’s weighing whether or not to call me on it.
“I think you do.”
The silence stretches between us, thick with everything neither of us can afford to say aloud.
She looks away first, gazing off into the forest. “You’re afraid of what the Keepers will do.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes find mine again. “To me?”
“To you. To Kai. To whoever those other threads lead to. The Keepers… are set in their ways, Lilith.”
“That’s not right. Complacency breeds stagnation. And stagnation rots from the inside out.”
I nod once, slowly. “You are right. Throughout my life I have watched them enforce stillness and call it peace,” I admit. “Watched them punish change and call it chaos.”
“Is that what I am to them?” she asks. “Chaos?”
I shake my head. “You are what comes after.”
Lilith goes still.
I did not mean to say it aloud. Did not plan to. But the moment leaves no room for lies.
“You are not a weapon, Lilith,” I continue. “You are a fulcrum. The Balance bends toward you, whether it means to or not.”
“Well, that’s certainly not comforting.”
“It is not meant to be.”
She huffs a breath—half laugh, half exhale—and looks past me toward the carnage.
“I can’t pretend it didn’t happen,” she finally says at last. “The scryer, I mean. The way it felt seeing those threads.Even if I wanted to… I think something inside me shifted when it lit up like that. Like a door opened and can never close again.”
“It did,” I reply quietly.
She glances at me. “And you’re just going to keep this quiet?”
